Growing Up Elizabeth May

Elizabeth May was born to be an activist. As a young girl, Elizabeth was worried about the health of the planet and believed it was her job to protect it. While other children were playing, she was raising money for important causes, researching the latest science and organizing protests. Before most people had heard about environmentalism, she was an environmentalist, living by her principle of “I have to do something.” Written with Elizabeth’s daughter Cate, this book reveals how Elizabeth’s activism led her to politics, first as leader of the Green Party of Canada and later as a Member of Parliament. Filled with environmental facts, profiles of young activists and tips for making change in your own community, this book is part biography and part blueprint for activists in the making.

Just Get Started! Be Unstoppable! Dream Big! How to Become an Accidental Activist profiles almost 100 activists from around the world, including change-makers like Greta Thunberg, Pete Seeger and Lilly Singh. This book shows us how ordinary people have persevered throughout history to do extraordinary things to help themselves and others. These activists come from many different backgrounds and a drives to take action. They work for human rights, to help the environment, to preserve historic buildings and more. This book will inspire young readers by giving them tips on getting started, continuing when the going gets tough and encouraging others to get involved. They will learn how to use determination, channel their passions and dream big to change the world.

A ringing manifesto for change from Canada’s Green Party leader and Activist. We Canadians are waking up from our long political slumber to realize that there will not be change unless we insist upon it. We have a presidential-style prime minister without the checks and balances of either the US or the Canadian systems. Attack ads run constantly, backbenchers and cabinet ministers alike are muzzled, committees are deadlocked, and civility has disappeared from the House of Commons. In Losing Confidence, Elizabeth May outlines these and other problems of our political system, and offers inspiring solutions to the dilemmas we face. “We no longer behead people in Canada, but Stephen Harper’s coup d’état cannot be allowed to stand, not least because of the precedent. Any future government can now slip the leash of democracy in the same way. This is how constitutions fail.” - Ronald Wright

The climate crisis is the issue of our time. Scientists have warned for over 100 years that burning fossil fuels and destroying nature will warm the earth's atmosphere and affect the climate in adverse ways: more severe and intense storms, prolonged heat waves, drought, flooding, wildfires, rising sea levels and ocean acidification. Urgent Message from a Hot Planet: Navigating the Climate Crisis outlines the science behind global heating and its root causes, provides ways to take action and honors the efforts of the millions of youth and adult allies from around the world working tirelessly to make a difference. Their powerful message: do something now!

The life of Josie Bassett was nothing short of a female pioneer adventure. Josie came west in a wagon train at the age of four. Settling in rugged Brown's Park in the extreme northwest corner of Colorado, Josie learned to ride and rope by the age of six. Like all girls, as a young teenager she discovered boys, but Josie's first real boyfriend was a future outlaw, none other than Butch Cassidy. As a young rancher's wife with two young boys, Josie witnessed first-hand the strong-arm tactics of the cattle barons trying to steal the land from smaller ranch owners. When it happened to the Bassett family, Josie's husband and father fought back. Murder occurred at the ranch when a man was hung from the gate post at the entrance of the Bassett ranch. Following a bitter divorce and a few more marriages, Josie moved to the remote area of Cub Creek in western Utah. Here she managed to make a living by hunting, making moonshine and possibly cattle rustling. (She was brought up on charges but acquitted.) Josie married a few more times, running off one husband with a frying pan. He later said, “Josie gave me fifteen minutes to get off her land, I only needed five!” Josie was the feature of a LIFE magazine article in 1948 and was a rodeo queen when she was in her 70s. Josie Bassett lived a long adventurous life, dying in 1963.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I bet you've been asked that question before. But have you ever thought about why humans work? There are almost 3.5 billion people working in the world today, and that number is growing. In Why Do We Work? author Monique Polak investigates the past, present and future of jobs, including how work has also been shaped by discrimination, privilege and child labor. Meet a variety of working professionals and explore why we have careers, vocations and professions. How is the way we work changing, and what will it look like in the future?

This first book in a feminist space opera duology follows seven resistance fighters who will free the galaxy from the ruthless Tholosian Empire--or die trying. When Eris faked her death, she thought she had left her old life as the heir to the galaxy's most ruthless empire behind. But her recruitment by the Novantaen Resistance, an organization opposed to the empire's voracious expansion, throws her right back into the fray. Eris has been assigned a new mission: to infiltrate a spaceship ferrying deadly cargo and return the intelligence gathered to the Resistance. But her partner for the mission, mechanic and hotshot pilot Cloelia, bears an old grudge against Eris, making an already difficult infiltration even more complicated. When they find the ship, they discover more than they bargained for: three fugitives with firsthand knowledge of the corrupt empire's inner workings. Together, these women possess the knowledge and capabilities to bring the empire to its knees. But the clock is ticking: the new heir to the empire plans to disrupt a peace summit with the only remaining alien empire, ensuring the empire’s continued expansion. If they can find a way to stop him, they will save the galaxy. If they can't, millions may die.

Against the pomp and pageantry of turbulent seventeenth century England, Elizabeth Goudge weaves the poignant tale of Lucy Walter, the proud and beautiful secret wife of Charles II. From her early childhood in a castle by the sea in Wales and the joys and pangs of childhood, to her tragic estrangement from the king and her death in Paris at the age of twenty-eight, Lucy Walter lived to the full a life of intense joy and equally intense drama. Miss Goudge portrays brilliantly a young love almost too ecstatic to bear. Equally moving is her characterization of Lucy—a spirited woman caught up in the cataclysmic wars and disruptive revolution of a tumultuous era. From London at the time of the Great Fire, to Paris when British royalty fled to the sanctuary of the Louvre, to Brussels and The Hague and a rich panoramic background—a master storyteller traces the life and loves of an extraordinary woman. The Child from the Sea is a superbly colorful and romantic historical novel alive with brilliant cameos and infused with a spiritual essence rare in our times.